Riverbank It management

Netbooks were last year’s revolution. With seven to ten inch screens these low-powered computers were designed to give you access to all the world’s information – the Internet. But that didn’t really happen.

What did happen is they grew larger and more powerful because people want to use them as small laptop computers. And this makes a great deal of sense. In a knowledge economy it’s the information you create that creates value, so you spend a lot of time putting information in. This requires processing power and a useable keyboard and screen, so customer demand forces up the size and power of the netbook.

So why choose a netbook? One great example was a four-day meeting I attended last month. One of us had a small netbook computer and was able to enter and organise his thoughts on the go. One of us had a pad of paper and was forced to spend hours after the meetings writing up his notes (ok I confess, my notes). Having seen the comparison I’m never doing that again. I’m buying a netbook – it’s small enough to be discreet and not affect the human interaction in the meeting and it has enough battery power for a day-long meeting. If you are a Riverbank client and would like to try it out, you are more than welcome.

Apple’s iPad reaches the UK later this month, having already sold a million units in its first month the US. It is certainly revolutionary, an inflated iPhone crossed with a laptop computer, but is it any good?  Some are calling it a game-changer whilst to others it’s more of a computer without its most vital component, the keyboard.

It’s a game-changer because it takes the best aspects of the iPhone and moves them up to the computer market. It’s lovely to operate and undoubtedly great to use. If you want to view a landscape photograph just turn the iPad round to landscape, if you want to edit a document in portrait view just rotate the iPad again. Now you can’t do that with a normal computer.

The weakness of the iPad is apparent if you want to enter lots of information – it doesn’t have a keyboard. The world hasn’t yet invented the successor to the Victorian typewriter keyboard and although the iPad does have a virtual keyboard on the screen it isn’t going to suit touch-typists.

It's Microsoft. In a deal announced earlier this month Microsoft is outsourcing its own IT support to Infosys. It just goes to show that as a business model, outsourcing functions like IT can be a very effective solution, whether you are Microsoft or a small or medium-sized business.

...to improve the quality of our business. I'm at the HTG summit in Dallas, Texas, this week. It's the annual conference of a US/UK/Australian group of some 200 IT service companies, all dedicated to helping each other improve their service through sharing best practice and learning from leaders in their field. It has been a series of intensive 12-hour days, but well worth the effort.

It's a great example of "co-opertition". Any competitive feelings are put to one side in the interests of learning and giving. And it really does work. If something like this exists in your field of work I strongly recommend you try it.

There it is on your keyboard, down at the bottom – the Windows button. The button no-one ever presses. It does have some good uses as a shortcut key to help you speed your way through your work. So take a quick look at the list below to see what it could do for you.

The Start button

At its simplest the Windows button is the same as clicking the Start button. Just quicker. Notice that the Start menu doesn’t appear until you let go of the Windows button. That’s because you can do other things while you are holding it down. Read on.

“Only old people use e-mail”, said my seventeen-year-old son. The young are busy communicating via instant messaging, text messages, Facebook and through whatever online game they are playing. Business might have taken over e-mail as a major form of communication but many millions of people have moved on to other media – the social media.

Here are seven reasons why you might want to use some of these new technologies.

It's a time of some change at Riverbank. After seven years of great work Ian Heritage has moved on and is now working for Sophos. Marc Prole will also be leaving at the end of April to travel round the world. We will miss them both. Evidence of the sad farewells are on the Riverbank Facebook site.

On the positive side we are very pleased to welcome three new recruits - Kyle Allard, Oliver Tulloch and Anas Khan. Kyle and Oliver feature in the Facebook photo album too

Watch out for good e-mails being filtered out by the Outlook junk mail filter. The Riverbank service desk has seen an increase in the incidence of false positives over the past few weeks. Our thoughts are that this could be due to changes in a recent Office update.

The Outlook junk mail filter is good but it's not the Riverbank recommended anti-spam solution. We firmly believe that you should keep at ams length the rubbish that now makes up 95% of global e-mail. You do this by directing your e-mail through a filtering process before it ever reaches your own computer system. It keeps you safer and it makes best use of that precious Internet bandwidth.

Riverbank will be exhibiting again at BioTrinity, the region's biggest conference and partnering event for the bioscience industry. The three-day event is at Newbury Racecourse and starts today, 12 April.

We look forward to meeting existing and new clients at our exhibition stand.

Riverbank's new management system is finally ready to go live. Three of us have spent Good Friday transferring help desk tickets, entering contracts and testing the system so we can be ready for Tuesday morning.

It has been a huge amount of work so far but the new system will enable us to manage almost every aspect of our business in one integrated database. It has also been a five-figure investment in software that will take our business forward - a system we can grow into rather than out of.

We hope the benefits to us and to our clients will become clear over the coming months.